secularism

In his article on Mail on Sunday, the British Prime Minister explains that values such as freedom, tolerance, social responsibility and the rule of law are virtues distinctively British that should be taught in schools. Cameron is factually, conceptually, historically and empirically wrong. These values he describes — tolerance, freedom, social responsibility, the rule of law — are desirable and worth upholding, but they are not ‘British’. They are global values that feature at the core documents of the biggest intergovernmental organisations like the Charter of the United Nations and the Lisbon Treaty. At best, they could be described as ‘Western Values’; an equally misguided conclusion since it assumes that non-Western countries endorse slavery, which is the opposite of freedom. Cameron...

I am very uncomfortable with the usage of the term post-something. We live in the post-secular age, Habermas argues, or “we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological” Žižek says in a recent article. This seems to suggest that we have indeed dealt with the challenges of the era that we have now left behind, in these cases the secular and ideological era, as if classes have become irrelevant and religion has either disappeared or became comfortably confined to the private sphere of the liberal state.